Dial Senior Living, founded in 1959, is a management company that owns and operates over 20 retirement communities across the United States. Based out of Omaha, Nebraska, the organization provides seniors with the living options they need to enjoy their lives without having to worry about maintenance issues, housekeeping matters, or security. Dial Senior Living is committed to giving its residents compassionate care and quality accommodations in a beautiful, comfortable environment that is stress-free and family-oriented.
The Challenge:
Dial Senior Living needed to provide system support for their corporations, communities, and residents, but they had outgrown their previous IT solution provider. As the company was expanding, their systems were experiencing substantial performance issues with end-user computing and connectivity. They were seeking a larger, more robust solution. Dial staff knew they needed a provider to grow alongside them and help their systems scale effectively and efficiently. They wanted to “lift and shift” their entire infrastructure to IP Pathways’ AdaptiveCloud™ platform, but they weren’t sure on specifics (e.g., how many virtual machines to include, how much compute power was necessary, how much data they needed, and so on). To make things easier, they wanted an outside expert to guide them through the modernization process and help them identify what types of solutions would be the most simple and effective for their unique situation.
Our Solution:
IP Pathways initially placed an AdaptiveIT technical expert on-site to assess Dial’s design and architecture to identify what upgrades were necessary to keep up with their day-to-day operations. We discovered that their infrastructure was outdated, and they were using remote desktop functionality to get to their data center. This was consuming a large portion of their bandwidth at each facility. We provided a Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution to improve Dial desktop performance and minimize the bandwidth required from each location. To provide secure services we were able to integrate our Managed Firewall as a Service with the VDI platform and relieve the burden of that piece of security from the Dial team.
Next, we moved all of Dial’s infrastructure to our data center. Because they didn’t have a data center of their own, we leveraged ours as a way to maintain all their infrastructure needs. We used VMware View for Dial’s VDI platform and coupled it with our AdaptiveCloud platform. Combining these two solutions enabled us to grow Dial’s infrastructure without purchasing new hardware. As the organization acquired additional properties, their systems were able to keep pace, which helped speed up their rollout process.
Dial Senior Living wanted to establish IT best practices across its facilities. Our AdaptiveIT expert worked with their staff to create a multi-tier plan that would help keep them consistent in terms of the hardware they were using within each facility. We also performed a software consolidation to reduce the number of applications they were using. This created ease of management for the staff.
Lisa Moes, Director of Corporate Initiatives at Dial Senior Living, said, “If we look back on where we started, we’ve definitely come a long way. We’ve made great strides, and we’re becoming more agile in our system performance. During one of our last construction projects, which just started taking residents, we got some feedback from operations that it was one of the smoothest transitions in onboarding that we’ve handled thus far, so kudos to IP Pathways for being a huge part of that.”